Amazon promotes new tool to protect cloud customers from attacks

Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a new security tool for cloud customers, part of a slew of product announcements this week designed to fend off competition from Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others in the fast-growing cloud computing market.

Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced Amazon Shield, new layers of protection designed against service interruptions like the cyber attack that took down top websites and affected some Amazon Web Services customers in October.

“This will really help you protect yourselves even against the largest and most sophisticated attacks we’ve seen,” he said on Thursday at AWS re:Invent, a conference in Las Vegas that drew 32,000 attendees.

Making the cloud secure is a major part of persuading companies to shift their data and computing workloads from on-premise servers they control to rented resources accessed via the internet.

Renting servers through the cloud offers lower costs, greater speed and flexibility. AWS has clients in a broad range of sectors, including health care, financial services, retail and transportation, highlighting rapid adoption of this approach to computing. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

Vogel’s announcement followed Wednesday’s unveiling of an image recognition program, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly, and tools for building conversational apps that highlighted Amazon’s push to add artificial intelligence to its cloud-computer offerings.

Amazon’s Web Services division is the Seattle-based company’s fastest-growing and most profitable source of revenue, offsetting regular quarterly losses from its e-commerce operation. Cloud computing revenue is projected to top $10 billion this year.